Lawmakers will press Boeing CEO for answers on 737 MAX crashes
WASHINGTON: The head of a US Senate panel reviewing two catastrophic Boeing 737 MAX crashes said ahead of hearings this week that the plane would not return to US skies until “99.9 per cent of the American public” and policymakers are convinced it is safe.
Boeing Co Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg will testify for two days before Congress starting on Tuesday, which is the anniversary of the Lion Air 737 MAX crash in Indonesia, the first of two crashes within five months that killed a total of 346 people.
“Clearly the accidents didn’t have to happen and I don’t think there was sufficient attention to how different pilots would react to signals in the cockpit,” Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee that will hold the first hearing, said in an interview.
Several reports have found Boeing failed to adequately consider how pilots respond to 737 MAX cockpit emergencies in designing the airplane.
The Federal Aviation Administration has spent months reviewing Boeing’s proposed software upgrades to a key safety system and other training and system changes but is not expected to allow the plane to return to service until December at the earliest.
“That plane won’t fly unless 99.9 per cent of the American public and American policymakers are convinced that it’s absolutely safe,” Wicker said, adding he planned to raise Boeing’s communication with the FAA during the 737 MAX’S development and “the relationship between regulators and manufacturers” during the hearing.
“The main question is how can we have a comfort level that they won’t happen again,” Wicker said.
Wicker said he expected to see the results of all the various investigations before proceeding to legislative moves and whether Congress must reform the FAA’S practice of designating some certification tasks to Boeing and other manufacturers.